Digital Teaching Competence and Performance among Chinese PE Teachers: The Role of Innovation and Organisational Support

Abstract

With China's rapid digitalization of higher education, teaching is not what it used to be, and PE is not an exception to that rule as it is considered to be the most embodied and the least digitisable discipline in the university. The purpose of this study is to explore if the digital teaching competence of university PE teachers is able to result in higher teaching performance, and to open the mechanism of such influence, the variables of instruction innovation and organisational digital support are selected as mediators and moderators, respectively, for a test. A structured questionnaire was used to gather data from 150 physical education teachers in the Chinese universities. The instrument included 10 Likert scale items and captured five demographic characteristics that measured four latent constructs: digital teaching competence, instructional innovation, organisational digital support and teaching performance. Internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) of all constructs ranged from acceptable (alpha ranging from .802 to .883). The data was analysed in SPSS using descriptive statistics, Pearson's correlation, simple and hierarchical multiple regression and the PROCESS macro (version 2.3 for model 4 – mediation and model 1 – moderation) with 5,000 bootstrap resamples. The results indicated that the digital teaching competence had a significant positive relationship with the teaching performance (β = .605, t = 9.244, p < .001) and accounted for 36.6% of the variance. Instructional innovation partially mediated this relationship, with a significant indirect effect of .230 (95% BootCI [.149, .325]) which made up 43.57% of the total effect. Organisational digital support made a significant difference in the competence–performance relationship (ΔR² = .050, F(1, 146) = 13.500, p < .001); the conditional effect of competence was .275 at low support and .668 at high support. The results suggest that digital skills are not enough in themselves: they lead to improved performance primarily because they facilitate teachers in changing how they teach; they are most effective in universities that invest in infrastructure, training and incentives. Implications for institutional policy and PE teacher development in China are discussed.